University of Virginia Library

Shortly after Harper and Brothers published her first novel, The Descendant, in 1897, Ellen Glasgow laid out a program. The success of The Descendant notwithstanding, she decided after candid self-examination that she had no technique, no art, no way of controlling her ideas; and to remedy these weaknesses she plunged into a study of the great masters of the craft of fiction—James, Flaubert, Maupassant, and Tolstoy. Her ambition was to be a great novelist, and she was determined to spare nothing in her preparation for the achievement of her goal.

The forty-one letters to her literary agent, Paul Revere Reynolds—now in the Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia—throw a good deal of light on these ambitious years. They help to date the various stages of composition of some of her early novels, reveal something of her attitude toward them and the novel in general, and show how carefully, even jealously, she protected her conception of herself as a writer. Although the letters cover a period of thirty-two years (1897-1930), more than half were written in the crucial years before 1901, when she was carefully laying the groundwork for her career. With poise, judgment, and sense of sureness remarkable in a literary novice in her mid-twenties, she shows that she had no intention of allowing her aesthetic goal to be compromised by carelessness in bringing her work before the public. She shows too that she knew from the very beginning precisely what she thought about her talent, the medium best suited to it, and the kind of audience she wanted for it.

Proper audience—and by this Miss Glasgow meant an intelligent, discriminating audience—is the most commonly recurring subject in the letters. It was her consideration for the right kind of audience, in fact, which seemed to govern a number of her opinions and decisions. Success, she pointed out several times, meant to her succès d'estime. "I hope," she wrote Reynolds in reference to her second novel, Phases of An Inferior Planet, "that the book will be successful, but the kind of success I prefer most now is that which comes from a discriminating public—which is never large" (Letter 17). And she reminded Reynolds again and again that she wanted none of her work to appear in second-rate magazines, a condition rigorously enforced until she was established well enough to command top prices for her stories. But even then the standing of the magazine was a major consideration with her (Letters 34, 36 and 40).

It is clear, I think, that Miss Glasgow was convinced that England could afford a more discriminating audience than America. Consequently, the English publication of her novels—a subject touched on in a good many of the early letters—was a matter of special concern, perhaps even, as Letter 2 suggests, of anxiety. The most pointed and emphatic letters in the group are those dealing with this subject, and their firmness of tone suggests an attitude bordering on Anglophilia. Writing to Walter Hines Page in March, 1898, she asked rather wistfully, "Given equally good work, do you believe that an American writer has as fair a chance of fame as an English one? I confess my own doubts strengthen the position that it is well for a writer to manage to be born in England if he can . . . ."[2] Her letters to Reynolds reflect the same attitude. She wanted a distinct English edition of her work, one issued by "a wholly English house" (Letter 10), a request that seems to say that she would prefer her English edition to have as little association with America as possible. "You know the opinion I have of Mr. Heinemann as a publisher," she wrote, but the crossed out capital "E" suggests that she started to write "English publishers" instead of "Mr. Heinemann," a slip which shows that she might have been thinking in generic rather than in specific terms. One notes, too, that the question of financial return was even less a consideration in respect to the English edition than in respect to the American.

It might have been her concern for proper audience which helped Miss Glasgow decide that the novel, not the short story, was her true medium, though the opinion also seems to have rested partly on aesthetic grounds. She renounced the short story early in her career

and expressed the wish that she could recall those she had already written (Letter 5). Although she continued to write them occasionally and even published a collection, The Shadowy Third and Other Stories, in 1928, she was never really very interested in them. It was probably Walter Hines Page who confirmed her in the opinion that the medium was of little value in developing the kind of audience she should have. "As regards my work," she wrote Page in November, 1897, when he was literary advisor to the Atlantic Monthly, "I shall follow your advice in full. I shall write no more short stories. . . ." Page's reply warned her that "authors of promise scatter the influences that ought to go towards the firm and steady building of great reputation by appearing in print here, there, and everywhere,"[3] by which he meant appearing in print with short stories. Miss Glasgow's comment to Reynolds, however, suggests that her reason for renouncing the story was that she regarded the form as unsuited to her talent: "The truth is that I am a novelist, not a writer of short stories, & in putting them upon the market I am trying to pass my least good work upon the public."

Page, incidentally, influenced Miss Glasgow in another matter touched on in the letters—her decision to give her third novel, The Voice of the People (1900) to Doubleday, Page, and Company rather than to her regular publishers, Harper and Brothers. He informed her in 1899 that Harper and Brothers was operating on a subsidy from the banking house of J. P. Morgan, a subsidy so large, in fact, that the publishers were for all practical purposes in the hands of a receiver. Miss Glasgow, fearful for the safety of her book, gave it to Doubleday, Page and Company—on the condition, one notes, that Page should say that he "heartily believed in the novel."[4] Reynolds, as Letter 29 indicates, protested this action and Miss Glasgow's reply to his objection shows how firmly and jealously she regarded the welfare of her novels.

The most dramatic letter in the collection is the last one, a single sentence refusal of an offer of $20,000 for the serial rights to one of her novels. Earlier in her career she expressed a good deal of interest in serialization of her work (Letters 7 and 27), but a growing reluctance (Letters 33 and 36), eventually became, as Letter 41 shows, a positive antipathy. Her objection, if we can judge from Reynold's memorandum of June 8, 1910, was primarily aesthetic. "She thinks," Reynolds noted,

"there might be too much atmosphere and characterization to make it [The Miller of Old Church] a good serial but thought it could be cut and condensed" (note to Letter 33). But nothing came of this plan; only one of her books, The Builders, was ever serialized.[5]

The blunt refusal of the final letter, though, is in no way out of character, for the letters, taken all together, record a continuous refusal of everything that conflicted with her principles. She refused quick and easy financial returns and popular fame, but above all she refused all uneasy doubts about the final worth of her work. As the letters show, she served her ambition to be a great novelist with bold, decisive, and uncompromising action—action as bold and decisive as the looping, nervous handwriting in which she issued her directions to Reynolds.